The century-old art of negging women in sports – “By winning the women’s national tennis championship from Miss Bjurstedt in the Thanksgiving Day tournament at the Long Beach, Cal, Mrs. May Sutton Bundy proved to doubters that a married woman can compete and hold her own in athletics…”

Court holds that bisexual asylum seeker isn’t actually bisexual, drawing withering dissent – “On Wednesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit issued an outrageous decision, holding that a bisexual Jamaican asylum-seeker isn’t actually bisexual and can thus be deported back to Jamaica. The three-judge panel’s reasoning is profoundly flawed and rather offensive, and betrays a profound skepticism toward the legitimacy of bisexuality itself.” From Dan.

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2 notes:
1. In reference to the centuries of negging article, is it odd of me to have read all the quotes from newspapers in an old-timey radio voice, because I totally did :P

2. mostly for my own benefit, but in case anyone else has a masochistic streak, don’t read the youtube comments on the engineering video. First one out denigrated feminism, one of the replies sought to explain the issues pointed out in the video with Evolutionary Psychology and all I realized really quickly I should have known better.

The problem wasn’t with the Spitfire, but with the Merlin engine, which also powered the Hawker Hurricane, the DeHaviland Mosquito, and eventually the American P51 Mustang.

Even with the carburetor defect, Battle of Britain Spitfires (very early models rushed into service) piloted by 18 year old boys with less than 20 hours of solo flying time inflicted substantially more losses upon the Germans than they suffered. Despite the Germans having, at that time, a vast body of experienced veteran pilots. The plane really was that significant.

The Spitfire was actually an older design than the Hurricane or the Messerschmidt 109. But as both of those were based on older designs, they were brought into service much sooner.

Mitchell’s design was the ONLY combat aircraft that was in continuous production before, during, and after WWII. By 1944, later models were among the only planes capable of intercepting V1 missiles.

The oxygenated pads story needs a physical chemist. Or an alchemist, if the explanation is “magic”. It doesn’t explain where the oxygen comes from. Well, the article does say it comes from water, with the pads dehumidifying while they oxygenate, but how? And what happens to the H&sub2;? (I hope that HTML works, it will look really cool if it does :-) I can imagine some truly nasty explosions (scarier than even the Gwyneth Paltrow vaginal steamer) , not to mention a major violation of the 1st Law of Thermodynamics.

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The Skepchick Network is a collection of smart and often sarcastic blogs focused on science and critical thinking. The original site is Skepchick.org, founded by Rebecca Watson in 2005 to discuss women’s issues from a skeptical standpoint.